Can the West offer Putin an off-ramp from Ukraine?

The adage ‘No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy’ — variously attributed to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Carl von Clausewitz, and Dwight Eisenhower — is being put to test again in Ukraine. Two weeks into Russia’s attacks on its offspring-turned-neighbour, things have not turned out well for Moscow. Every passing day that Kyiv holds out against Russia furthers the impression that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have miscalculated — badly.

Putin’s first mistake appears to be the assumption that many Ukrainians would welcome the attacking Russian army as liberators. Russian soldiers were told that they would be greeted with flowers, food, and warmth as they rolled into Ukraine, under the mistaken belief that ethnic brotherhood would trump nationalism that has taken root during 30 years of freedom from the Moscow yoke. While this may have been true in the two provinces of Donestsk and Luhansk, adjoining Russia, the further west Russian troops moved in, the greater resistance they met because much of western Ukraine and the country’s millennials are in thrall of Europe.

Putin’s second mistake was underestimating the capacity of America, even in its domestically weakened and fractured state, to rally its allies, and bend world opinion to its narrative. The argument that Russia was backed into a corner by the United States expanding Nato to its borders and has lashed out in desperation to maintain the last of its strategic depth has been subsumed by portrayal of Moscow as the predatory aggressor. The US may be a declining power, but it still controls the global information pathways and narrative, and the world’s financial system.

Putin’s third miscalculation was in believing the might of the rejuvenated Russian military which, it turns out, is not all that it is cracked up to be. It is one of the enduring mysteries why superpowers, whether it is the US or the USSR or its offspring, don’t realise that all the might of their military can at best suppress, but not overcome, resistance of people who do not want to be subjugated. Apparently, they have learned nothing from Vietnam or Afghanistan.

Putin could have cut his losses, or preserved his gains, had he stopped at Donetsk and Luhansk. As it did in the case of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the West would have kicked and screamed a bit and then it would have been business as usual. But Ukraine is too big to swallow. It is now stuck in Moscow’s throat, with Putin unable to expel it or gulp it down. The choke is on Russia as much as it is on Ukraine.

Is there a way out of this diplomatic and military morass? The US and its Nato partners can sit back and revel in Russia’s discomfiture – or misadventure – harking back to the days when the Soviet Union was stuck in the Afghan quagmire. All they have to do is keep Ukrainians supplied with arms and allow them to be cannon fodder – as they did with Afghans. But as it happened then, this strategy brings its own dangers and eventually comes back to bite America. In fact, it may not even take that long. CIA chief William Burns, who as far back as 2008 (when he was US ambassador in Moscow) was prescient in predicting Putin’s actions if Nato pushed too far east, has correctly warned that an angry, humiliated, and diminished Putin may lash back in ways that are unpredictable and may inflict even more pain on Ukraine.

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In one sense, the quagmire is on both sides – political on one side; military on the other. And it is sucking the whole world in. Forget Vietnam and Afghanistan, not many lessons appear to have been learned from World War I, when Germany was abjectly humiliated. We know what came next.